Checking Saddle Fit – Behind the Scenes

We all know that to keep saddles fitting well, they need to be regularly evaluated.  Ideally every six months.  Ideally by a saddle fitting professional.  Sometimes the ideal schedule falls through the cracks and sometimes we get away with it.  If problems occur, you know who to call but in the meantime, here is some food for thought.

Every time we sell a saddle, I stress the value of establishing a maintenance schedule.  Put us in your calendar.  It might be six months, a year, three months….it is something the owner has to establish as the correct schedule for you and your horse.  As the decades pass, more and more of our calls are for saddle checks and most of those checks result in some sort of work that we will do to keep you and your horse comfortable and happy.  This is SO important because horses AND riders change.  This is SO hard on our end because it is hugely time consuming and not particularly profitable for the business.

We have over 10,000 clients in our database and lots of saddles to maintain so we have some guidelines:

• We do evaluations on any saddle but can only service the saddles that we have sold to the current owner
• We ask the owner to provide us with current information prior to an appointment
• We do our best to group appointments so that we make the best use of our time (and the customer is charged less in the way of travel costs)
• We offer discounts on repair costs for our continuing customers to say ‘thank you for your loyalty’
• When we do saddle evaluations we do safety checks on those saddles and when they come into the shop we do an even more detailed safety check
• By having us do the upkeep and repair work on the saddles we have sold, the owner’s warranty is upheld
• By working directly with the manufacturers, our training on the saddles we work on is current, correct and using the correct materials

Your feedback is very valuable so whether you find something particularly useful or if there is something lacking in what we can provide the community, please tell us!  Email is the best way to have a useful dialog and our address is info@tackcollection.com

Happy Riding!